


Trust Me

by ProwlingThunder



Series: First Words [6]
Category: Fallout 3, Fallout 4
Genre: 16 is Adulthood in Lamplight, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Caravans, First Words Soulmarks, Fresh From Lamplight, Gen, Mac's First Year in the Wasteland, Mungos, Soulmate AU, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 11:49:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6752713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/ProwlingThunder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Lamplight, the words scrawled across their skin are just words. They're not hidden and they mean nothing: they are just words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trust Me

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [_Trust Me_ \- The Devil's Carnival](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqTQYGUhz_Y) because this song is amazing and it basically describes the whole thing.

The Wasteland was a brutal place. There were super mutants and raiders, of course; those he'd already known, of course. Radscorpions and Deathclaws were also by no means something MacCready was unfamiliar with. He might have spent his whole life under a rock, but he'd spent it defending that rock to the death from all those things. But it was the heat that really got to him. When the sun came up in the mornings, even the occasional cool nights were quick to flee in wake up the impressive heat the oppressive sunshine was intent on using to scorch every last square inch of the earth. And it was doing an impressive job, too.

The caravan he had signed up with was a small outfit; just a couple of people-- two guards named Darryl and Todd, a saleswoman calling herself Alleycat Tabs, and a Brahmin that he was pretty sure they had just named Moo. He thought that Moo belonged to Todd, for all that Tabs was the one selling things in the settlements they tripped over.

And they were pretty nice, for mungos. Tabs was selling him the rifle, and he had another good month on it before she was willing to consider it paid, but it was a solid thing with a well-crafted stock and a secure barrel, none of that pipe bullshit the raiders in this area were carting around. The only good thing he'd found in the hands of raiders these last few months was a scope, which Todd had been more than happy to try to buy off him.

MacCready had attached it to his rifle instead, even though selling it to him would have let him pay Tabs for the clothes she had sold him. He was a sniper though; he needed the distance.

Right now, however, he was busy peeling those clothes from his skin. He had already removed the jacket, balling it up and shoving it in the guard crate on Moo hours ago. Now the plain white shirt she'd sold him was soaked and half-transparent, and he had to pull his scarf off to tug the material over his head. Darryl was throwing him amused looks; Mac didn't feel like explaining that he had grown up in a cave. He'd never been this hot before.

"You're sweating more bullets than you've shot, kitten," Tabs told him, even as he balled up the shirt and shoved it in the line with his jacket. She held out a jar of purified water to him, her eyes sharp and attentive. She reminded him a little of Lucy, with that expression. "Have a drink."

He dreaded putting his scarf back on. But more than that, he dreaded putting it in the crate, too, so he had to wear it _somehow._ "I don't have the caps for a bottle of water."

Tabs rolled her eyes. "Drink the water, kitten. We'll settle down for a few hours, let Moo catch her breath. Then when the sun starts to drop, we'll keep going. Should reach Wreckville only a few hours late."

"Moo isn't going to carry you across the wasteland if you pass out on us from heat stroke, MacCready," Todd told him, his tone dry. He was nursing a flask from his hip, and a part of him wondered why it was so good that he had to sip on it all the time.

"I don't intend to take a dirt nap," he grumbled. It was too hot to be properly angry at him, too hot to snip back. He folded his scarf in half and wrapped it around his hip, looping the ends up and through the fold to secure it there. Some of the kids had did this, in Lamplight; it was a trend for a couple of years. He had never really gotten into it before. "Fucking stop trying to get me to quit, Todd, it ain't going to work."

Todd grinned at him, showing off all his perfect damned teeth. He wanted to knock them out.

He settled for accepting Tabs' can of water instead, half-wishing he could upend it over his head. But it wasn't cold and that would be a waste, so he didn't. He hooked his finger in the tab instead and peeled the lid back. He could hear Lucy in the back of his head, warning him to sip at it slow instead of guzzle it down; he hadn't drank anything in hours, he was dehydrated and hot and he would only succeed in making himself sick and then he would end up _more_ dehydrated.

Tabs made a satisfied sound that he made a solid point to ignore. He wasn't catering to her whims; he was just honestly thirsty, was all, and he knew she had good water. Lucy would scold him for not taking care of himself, and he couldn't disappoint Lu, not when he hadn't seen a bottle of dirty water since he climbed out of the caverns.

He wasn't doing it because Tabs was damned near a kid instead of a mungo. She picked on him and teased him when he wasn't expecting it, but she treated him equal, and she respected that he could take care of himself. Tabs and her adulthood were a thing he was not going to forget, and so they were a very valid reason not to do things for Tabs.

She held another canister of water out to him when he finished with the one in his hand. "One more. For me? You don't have to drink it now, but I'll feel better if you hold onto it, at least."

..he could hold onto it. For the moment, while they were waiting in the shade. Taking it from her hands seemed to satisfy her entirely, though, because she moved away from him and tugged a metal bucket off Moo's back. "Alright! Todd and I are going to trek a bit to get Moo some water herself. There shouldn't be one too far off the beaten path. You wait here with the kitten and Darryl, okay Moo? Stay... stay. Good girl."

MacCready frowned a bit. Tabs didn't notice, of course, turning away from him and the brahmin both to haggle Todd off his rock. Which was really easier said than done, but, in the end, she just reached out and snagged him by the ear, like he was a misbehaving child who wouldn't eat his vegetables. He cast his blue eyes around for Darryl, and found him several paces away perched up on top of a rock, binoculars pulled up to his face. A lookout.

Honestly, he had no idea how Darryl could stand being up there in the sunshine. The top side of rocks was always hot in the daytime.

 _"Is_ there even any water around here?"

Darryl shifted a bit to glance down at him beneath his lenses. "We're not so far out in the wasteland not to find fluke puddles of water, but Tabitha runs this trek a lot. We're only a few stones away from an old settlement that isn't here no more. Unless the well's ran dry, yeah, there's plenty of water there. She'll probably even re-seal your can with a hammer." He paused a moment, and then his lips twisted into a sharp frown. "Do me a favor and sit down before you faint. You're as pale as an albino radscorpion, and that ain't the normal color of a human being."

It was Darryl who was doing the asking, so Mac stole Todd's rock.

Moo spent the wait with both her heads nosing at the ground, trying to find even the smallest blade of grass, and MacCready spent it sipping on Tabs' can of water, enjoying the coolness of the shade.

Tabs and Todd wandered back after about a half-hour, and Mac noted with some satisfaction that Todd had been made to carry the full bucket back. He sat it in front of Moo's right head and pressed his foot against it to keep it from sliding, even as he glanced over at the nook he had previously claimed and found it occupied.

The sniper sipped on the water and watched him back.

He wanted to sleep. He had wanted to sleep since they had left, just close his eyes and rest through the heat of the day. Darryl was playing watchman, however, perched up on top of his pillar, and that meant that MacCready was the spotter, as well as the only person making sure Moo didn't wander off.

Tabs considered his empty canister of water quite seriously, and then fished another out of the brahmin's saddle-packs and marched it over to him. He shot her an expression only a _little_  surly, but accepted the trade for what it was.

"You're looking a little better now, kitten. Not so much like you're going to faint outright on us. Why didn't you say you were getting so hot? Heat stroke's no laughing matter."

"I really don't know what you're talking about," which was.. hard to admit, in Todd's earshot. He did his best to ignore that he was standing over there glaring at him, taking a moment to fiddle with the top of the can before he peeled it open. He sipped at it, to take that hard edge off Tabs' expression.

"Heat stroke. It's when the body gets so hot that it starts to use up all the water in a hurry, like rain only backwards. If you don't cool down and drink a lot of water, you could die."

 _"Not_ dying."

"That's good," Tabs nodded. Weirdly, she sounded like she was very glad that _not dying_ was on the top of Mac's to-do list. He rolled his eyes at her proud tone, uncomfortable with the idea that she cared so much. He was just a guard to her. They were nice, but they were mungos, and he wasn't going to stick around until they decided they wanted to slit him open and toss him to the deathclaws. "But really, you have to tell us these things, kitten. Your health is just as important as the cargo Moo's carrying for us. We can't have either of you going down."

Flattery. But it helped. He knew that for a Caravaner, the brahmin that carried their wares was more than a mode of transport; it was their whole life, and if the brahmin died, they may as well follow it to the grave. Certainly cattle could carry significantly heavier loads than any human, and if they broke Moo's load down between the four of them, they'd still end up leaving most of it behind.

Or making a sled. He was banking on that plan, really, because Tabs didn't sell junk or scrap, not really, and it would be just plain stupid to leave any of it behind for scavengers to find. Not to mention a net loss of holy fuck.

He sipped at his water to keep from relying immediately, doing his damnedest to ignore the embarrassed heat that flooded his cheeks at her words. Shit but did she ever remind him of Lucy. "I'll be sure to keep that in mind."

"That's not the answer I want to hear," Tabs frowned at him, resting her hands on her hips. Mac frowned back at her, unmoved and unwilling to budge.

Tabs broke first and moved away from him in a huff, going to put the empty cylinder away. It didn't _really_ feel like a victory, but he was willing to take any of them he could get. He wasn’t going to shirk his job for a bit of discomfort, and he didn’t want any special treatment. He wasn’t a kid anymore.

"I'm hungry,” Tabs announced, and Mac had the sneaking suspicion she really wasn’t. “Todd, do you think you could kick up a bit of fire? I'm thinking a meal of oatmeal is all for the best tonight, and I'm not ready to start out again."

"Sure thing, pussy-cat. What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to unload Moo. She needs a break if we're taking one."

MacCready had helped Tabs unload the Brahmin and set up shop before. He was familiar enough with all the steps, since it was a part of his _job_ to help Tabs unload when they hit settlements. He rested the water carefully next to his kidnapped seat and stood up, making his way over to help with the ropes. Tabs shot him a look, but anything she had been planning to say died in her throat. She looked away from him and they worked together in blessed silence.

It was an easy, comfortable thing to do, now that he had a little practice with it. Todd made it out to be the end of the world when he had to help Tabs with something so mundane, but back in Lamplight, it had been just another part of the job, organizing and maintaining supplies so that everything could be found when it needed to be.

He had been roped into so many cleaning and sorting jobs in his seven year tenure as Mayor that he'd actually had to start sleeping by a set schedule, or face Lucy's wrath. The busiest of days he'd had precious little time to himself, but at least it hadn't been so overwhelming that he'd never had time for anything else. Being Mayor had been so much more than organizing what they did have and writing lists for what they didn't.

And someone _had_ to write lists, or Zip seriously never would have come back with anything except Nuka-Colas. Maybe Zip could have survived entirely off carbonation and caffeine, but no one else could, and they had all been half-starving anyway.

One thing that he didn't miss was the great lack of food stores they'd never had. But Eclair's cooking...? That he missed.

Tabs' oatmeal was... okay. For something that she hadn't grown and cut herself, for something that was actually designed to be food. It was.. edible. It almost tasted good on it's own. But it tasted so much better with a little bit of sugar-- which was dismally expensive and a decadent luxury, so he could do without-- or some tarberries, when he managed to slip them into his bowl. Tabs seemed to be under the impression that her food was divine and needed no enhancements. Todd usually agreed.

Darryl carried a jar of hot sauce and quite liberally spread it on literally everything Mac had ever seen him eat.

But in Lamplight, _vegetables and fruit_ had been on everyone's watch-for list. Not that the scavengers had ever managed to find a lot of vegetables, and fruits? Those had been few and far between. They lived mostly off cave fungus, the whole community, and they managed to get some of the vegetables to grow, a little. But every bit of it had gone to the littlest kids first, because they were the ones who'd really needed it.

He sat the last crate down on the ground and went to pull the blankets off Moo, casting a long glance in Tabs' direction. She was over with Todd's cook-fire, making edible but tasteless oatmeal...

He shook out the blanket and folded it up on top of the stack, kneeling next to his assigned crate to dig out the few berries he'd found these last couple of weeks. To be honest, he'd never seen tarberries before he had left Lamplight, which.. kind of made sense, honestly. Belladonna grew outside of Lamplight, and all it had taken was one kid eating the fruit off that for the whole lot of them to swear off berries entirely. If it wasn't at least as big as a fist, it wasn't edible.

Darryl'd had to eat them first before Mac had actually believed him. And he'd showed him how to recognize the plant.

It only grew in perpetually wet places, but it dried and kept pretty well, and it was really, really sad that he could never go back to Lamplight. He could take them some, and they'd probably grow in the fungus pools. _Fruit_ in _Lamplight._ Fruit _grown_ in Lamplight, no less. But no. He'd had to become a mungo to even find out they existed.

Something changed in the air; it wasn't something he'd seen or heard, but something he'd felt, tickling at his awareness, prickling at his skin. Then Darryl deliberately kicked a stone aside to make noise, alerting Mac to his location. His calloused fingers came down, resting against the bared skin at the nape of his neck, and Mac's jaw came closed with a _clack._ "You really should cover those up, kid."

It was just Darryl. There was no realistic reason to be upset with him, even if he hadn't been expecting it. Physical contact from Darryl was rare, a commodity as precious as rain, and MacCready usually only got it when the elder was trying to _help_ him in one way or another.

At least it hadn't been Todd. Darryl didn't _invade_ his space, he simply _was._ He could not say the same thing for the other caravan guard.

And it was his words as much as his touch that set him apart.

With Todd, he could have guessed what he was referring to. He had _seen_ the others without their shirts, on particularly hot days-- for some dumb reason, black was the color of choice for caravan folk-- and he wasn't too much a fool to not be able to appreciate the fact that there was some seriously defined muscle on them. Darryl, Todd, _Tabs._ He was shorter than all of them by a good measure, and he knew his body looked absolutely nothing like theirs at all. Lamplight hadn't exactly lent itself to a surplus of nutrition, and what little he knew about growing up was that good food was _required_ to be healthy. Living in a cave hadn't done him any favors either. That _he_ hadn't ended up with rickets was a fucking miracle.

But he didn't have muscles like they did. He didn't have the _stamina_ they did, and he strongly suspected that Tabs had deliberately slowed their pace a bit ever since she had agreed to take him on, there on the road. The thought usually found a good place to itch at him, when he was feeling particularly down or, sometimes, when he was feeling all right and just not expecting it. _He_ was slowing the Caravan, and Tabs and Moo had somewhere they needed to _be_ , and _Robert Joseph MacCready_ was making them late.

They'd never said anything about it. Somehow that made it worse.

But all of it made the slowly developing musculature something that he was proud of, even if he'd never let them see it. It was emerging proof that he was getting stronger, that he could go longer. He wouldn't be slowing them down for long. He'd be able to hold his own against them longer, if it came down to that.

Todd had mentioned his looks before, unflattering and unwelcome as it was, and there was a reason he had nearly baked in his clothes before starting to strip that had literally nothing to do with how often he burned.

Darryl, on the other hand, had _never._

Mac couldn't fathom what he was on about, and turning his head to look up at him didn't bring him any insights of wisdom into the workings of the adult mind. But Darryl wasn't looking at him, either; he was watching Todd and Tabs, on the other side of camp. He was.. no, he was _definitely_ glaring at them, as if he could scour a line in the sand and keep them on _that side._

Whatever Darryl was referring to, he didn't want either of them to know about it. And that, of course, made him desperately _want to._

"Darryl--?"

He shook his head, sharp, and the sniper immediately went silent. When Darryl spoke, his voice was still low. "Get into my crate and find the blue shirt. Cut the sleeves off of it." No _kid_ , the familiar that Darryl had taken to when he realized it got Mac's attention quicker than his own name. No opening for conversation. His tone was something that Mac had to follow, and he found himself putting the jar of tarberries aside and rooting through the assigned crate.

It didn't take him but a minute. Darryl didn't have a lot stored in there. He kept most of his possessions on his person, the same way Mac did, except Mac didn't own a knife or a pair of scissors. He pulled the blade from Darryl's boot instead and let his hands work, blue eyes focusing as he sheared at the seams. It wasn't a good job; cloth cut at strange angles, not smooth and pretty like he had once seen Lu do it, making old blankets into summer clothes. But Darryl didn't say he wanted it looking good.

He slid the knife back into it's hidden holster just as Darryl said, "Now pull it on."

"What? No, it's fucking hot."

 _"Kid,"_ there was no friendship in the word at the moment. The tone raised his hackles, raised his memories; he'd used it with the kids in Lamplight, to get them to _behave_ before they got themselves _killed_ . _"Pull it on."_

MacCready pulled on Darryl's blue shirt.

It wasn't very big; certainly it was too small for Darryl to have ever _worn_ it, he was built like a bus. But it was big enough that it was loose on his frame, and the arm holes gaped over his shoulders and down a bit of his sides. A breeze caught the material where they were, and instead of barring it from his flesh like his own clothes had done, it funneled the cooled air inside.

It felt _amazing._ Holy shit. Did he have to buy too-big clothes from Tabs to get air flow like this?

Darryl's hand fell to rest on his shoulder, squeezing careful, and then it fell away. "Don't ever, ever go topless around these folks."

That.. didn't sound right.

"Why not? You guys do it all the time. You didn't sound upset when I stripped earlier."

The older guard shook his head. "Wasn't looking at your back when you stripped, either. But damn it, kid, you can't go showing off your Words to the whole damned world. That's how you get yourself burned. And no Caravaner worth their salt won’t take advantage of it, if they can. You can't trust them with 'em."

"I," MacCready started, not measuring his words. But since Darryl was still talking quiet, he would, too. "Have literally no idea what the fuck you're talking about."

“Yeah, I noticed that too.”

\--

Everyone in Little Lamplight had known about the words scrawled across their skin. They were just there, like freckles or moles, and sometimes new words bloomed like cave fungus and sometimes they faded like old scars. They just _existed_ , and everyone knew what was marked on each other's skin. It wasn't like it was a secret. MacCready hadn't even worn a shirt until he was big enough to climb up on the walls and line a rifle, and by that point going without a shirt was somewhat hazardous.

Everybody who was on the walls wore clothes. A lot of people who _didn't_ work the walls wore clothes. But when they were small.. clothes were a thing that hadn't mattered. Finding clothes for kids was a hassle anyway.

But he knew all his words. They were small enough that the little ones practiced reading them sometimes, and even the ones on the back of his neck, someone had drawn out for him when he was younger. He couldn't remember a time that he had ever not known what they were, what each letter was. Even if he couldn't read much else.

According to Darryl, it was important that he never let anyone _else_ read them, either, or he risked being tied up with a person who he wasn't supposed to.

He didn't know how he felt about the idea of soulmates. Darryl'd had to explain what they even were, some sort of perfect match for an individual, someone who would protect and cherish and _love them_ , someone he could trust and who would trust him in turn, and frankly Mac thought that was a load of shit.

He was a mungo now, and anyway, he had three lines on his flesh. Unless his soulmate was going to be perpetually under sixteen, which was just, no, thanks, he was never going to do that, he was a _mungo,_ then MacCready didn't see how he could trust them, and they damned sure could never trust _him._

He didn't want to tell Darryl that the concept of a perfect someone existing somewhere was ridiculous and not feasible.

He didn't want to tell him that the whole of Lamplight and a whole lot of kids who'd turned mungo had seen him without his shirt, so it was pointless to hide his words _now._

He didn't admit that Darryl's claim of those words being the first ones his would-be soulmate said to him was a day late and a cap short, because a bunch of people had claimed they weren't there to hurt him, and Mac had ultimately had to kill all of them.

Better he just never entertained the concept of it. Besides, who'd fall in love with a mungo like him, anyway?

\--

Tabs pressed further even still, working the Caravan up into a territory Darryl called Greenland.

Mac had no idea why he did it, since everything still seemed to be primarily dead brown dirt and equally dead brown trees, devoid of leaves for ages. There were more settlements, comparatively; less super mutants and their centaurs, less radscorpions in general. Greenland just sort of felt like the wrong thing to call it.

Not that it mattered overmuch. Where Tabs went, MacCready had to follow as long as he still had to pay off his gear, and when Tabs stopped to rest, he caught what little shut-eye he could manage.

It eventually offset their traveling hours enough that they were moving almost exclusively after dark. Darryl didn’t seem to like it any more than he did, but Todd was more than happy to move when Tabs wanted to move, as long as he got the front of the line.

Mac didn’t.

The town they were heading too was hardly large enough to warrant being called a town, and it didn’t even get to have a name. But it was a settlement Tabs wanted to go to, wanted to stop at, and this would be the last stop he had to pull to pay off his rifle. Mac didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.

It was easy to be ambushed in the dark, and of course, that’s almost exactly what happened.

The moon was high above their heads, and it bathed the non-existent road in bold silver. It was eerie, to be honest; he didn’t think he’d ever be able to get used to it, seeing that orb hang full in the sky. He knew why cave ceilings stayed where they were supposed to; he understood what happened if the foundation shifted, or a cave wall collapsed. He _knew_ what a cave in could do.

None of that explained why the _moon_ stayed in the sky. Sometimes it hung so low he was sure it would come down on him, although it never seemed to. Some nights, it felt close enough to reach out and touch, like the low roof of some smaller caverns.

But most nights, it made the world just light enough that things moving out in the distance were just visible enough to a sniper’s sharp eye, so he saw them first.

Honestly, he was _used_ to raiders skulking around in the dark. Raiders nosing about the entrance to the caverns had been a common occurrence, and maybe the super mutants on the other side of Murder Pass had been the most dangerous thing they had faced, that hadn’t changed the fact that Robert Joseph MacCready had gotten really used to sniping threats in the head.

Thanks to his scope, he could see them at an even greater distance, but he dared not pull the trigger--

People burst from the treeline to the right some fifty feet away, and he cursed himself for being so fool as to have targeted the diversion instead of the real threat.

They didn’t stay that way long.

He wondered how many of them would have said, _“Calm down, I‘m not here to hurt you,”_ and decided the answer was probably _all of them._

After, he brushed the blood off his cheeks, probably smearing it instead of removing it, which would be just his luck. At least it wouldn’t drip.

There had been six of them altogether, and they had gotten far too close for his comfort, honestly. Close enough for a pistol to hit was too close, and too close was fucking bullshit. What good was Todd on point if he couldn’t register a threat? What was the point of following Tabs if she was going to walk them into an ambush?

None. Zero.

And what was worse was that he didn’t think he’d gotten them all. He could almost feel someone’s attention on him, the way he could back at Lamplight when slavers _knew_ they’d had the right spot and couldn’t quite bring themselves to test him.

They usually did. Slavers and raiders were both from the same brand of stupid. They were just smart enough to figure out that they _might_ get shot, but not quite durable enough to come in swinging like the mutants and centaurs at Murder Pass. Sometimes they thought they could wait him out, and they were always wrong. He didn’t get to be Mayor for Life by being outsmarted by mungos.

But whoever it was, Mac couldn’t see them. He wondered if they were a lawgiver or not, one of those mungos that went around cutting swaths through other mungos, like the big kids had done. Maybe he was just being paranoid.

Probably not.

He wondered if they’d be upset he had taken their kills from them, and then decided he didn’t give a fuck. They should have taken them out before he had the chance.

He twisted the strap of his rifle around his wrist, lowering it so he could run his fingers through his hair. Behind him, he could hear Darryl asking Tabs if she was okay, Todd sniping that he’d taken out the greater number-- braggart and a liar, but MacCready knew how many of them he’d fell and how many of them he _hadn’t,_ so it didn’t matter what Todd wanted to claim.

“If nobody’s hurt, we need to keep going,” Darryl said at length, quelling Todd’s ridiculous claim that _he_ had shot all of them. “I’d like to actually sleep at some point, and I don’t care to do it by a bunch of corpses.”

“I.. alright.” Tabs’ voice was shaken a bit. Honestly, he was glad; it was about fucking time she got it around her head that there were safe times to travel and times when it wasn’t the best plan. Mac had only ever ran in the dark when he had to; either he was scaving, back in Lamplight, picking around in caves and abandoned places where having light wasn’t an option, or…

Or…

Fuck, he missed Lamplight.

In Lamplight, everything the dead had was useful for something.

He stalked forward, dropping down to pat the first corpse down-- _male, mungo, but the clothes would have fit Stu back when Stu had still been alive--_ and there were caps and cigarettes in the pocket, and a flip lighter. Not a lot of caps or cigarettes, though, but the mungo had a pocket full of loose rounds. He dumped them into the ammo pouch he had cinched around his hips, went looking for the dropped gun as he moved to the next body-- _female, mungo, looks like Lu but couldn’t be, because Lu was dead too and it was thanks to assholes like these_.

It was a waste to leave even the clothes behind, but he could haggle with Tabs over the weaponry and ammo he didn’t need. Alleycat Tabs didn’t buy clothing, she had a deal with some caravan company, and she only carried what she had to by contract, he thought. It didn’t change that he wanted to take them and store them away, an old habit that was just Lamplight practice.

Clothes had their uses. Leaving them was such a damned _waste._

He dumped the contents of the last one’s pockets into his bags, heavier now with more ammo and caps then he’d had since he came out of Lamplight Caverns.

“MacCready, we will leave your ass here!”

The obscenities he growled under his breath didn’t carry back to Todd, but he felt better for having said them at all. Mac was willing to take his fair share of the blame here, he was. But he wasn’t going to keep letting mungos try to _get themselves killed_ while he was supposed to be keeping their damned asses alive.

He checked the surroundings again before he dared stand up, running his fingers over his scarf to brush off any trail dust it could have picked up. Had to stop and check again in the light that the speck of dirt he had been flicking off wasn’t actually blood. It would be just his luck to get blood on his scarf.

“I’m fucking serious, kid, let’s go!”

He decided against elaborating on the intense and deep-seated desire to put a bullet in his ass. If Todd was going to whine and moan, there should be a reason, right?

But it would be so much easier just to settle his debt with Tabs at the next town and be on his way without leaving a bad taste behind. He might have to deal with them later, and it would be easier if they didn’t know it was coming.

None of them had even asked if he was okay.

-

Tabs was… upset, to hear that he wanted to leave, which made him feel almost like staying, except in all the ways that it didn’t. “But _why?_ We have a good thing here, kitten!”

Todd was _less_ upset to hear he wanted to go, which only went to prove that he was making the right choice, separating himself from the mungos before they could get him killed. “About damned time, brat.”

Darryl didn’t say anything to him, even when Tabs tried to harass him into staying and getting some sleep. Which was fine, really, because Mac hadn’t thought he would. Darryl was too careful, and there was clearly some other reason he was sticking around these two than he knew about.

He definitely did not stay in town to get some sleep.

Luckily he had sold some of his salvage to Tabs before broaching the subject. He was young and paranoid, not stupid.

-

There was a decent outcropping about an hour back the route they had came in. A ledge, with an overhang and a decent spot to wedge himself into comfortable and relatively safe shadows for some sleep, well out of the way from mungos and their fucking stupidity.

He didn’t _quite_ manage to make it, because he didn’t have that kind of luck, who knew.

-

The mungo was tall, hair as red as blood and eyes a color that he didn’t have a name for. He was also a fucking _ghost_ and MacCready really aught to just put a bullet in him and be done with it, but he didn’t and he wasn’t sure why.

He told himself that at this range the blood-splatter would destroy his scarf. It would take too long to draw his aim up to put a bullet between his eyes; he was fucking _tall,_ okay? And maybe it was all of that coupled with the fact that he smiled, and something… There was something honest about it, in a way he hadn’t seen in a mungo’s smile before. Like he was genuinely happy to see him.

And then he opened his mouth, and ruined _everything._

“Calm down, I’m not here to hurt you.”

_Fuck._

Mac narrowed his eyes on him, letting all his mistrust pour out of him. It wasn’t the first time he’d ever heard the words. It damned sure wouldn’t be the last. Darryl had only gotten under his skin, explaining them. That was all. It was a fluke and it didn’t matter.

Maybe it made him a touch more sour than he should have been, but the man didn’t appear to notice.

“My name’s Jack,” he introduced. It was short, the way names from Lamplight were _usually_ short, and he already knew he wasn’t going to be forgetting it in a hurry. Simple names were some of the best ones. “You look like you might be a good shot. I was wondering, are you for hire?” His fingers vanished into his pocket for a moment. When it came back, it was to the clinking of caps. The sound sobered him up a bit.

“Why should I trust you, mun-- _Jack?”_ Jack’s smile was fucking distracting and it only served to make him more ill-tempered. It was upsetting. He hadn’t even _said_ the word mungo since he had left the caverns. He had been doing pretty good at policing himself.

The caps shifted; twenty, maybe thirty. Forty if he was really fucking lucky. He was getting better at guessing blind, but caps were shit he’d only had to really deal with for a few months. He tried to focus on that and not the resentment trying to brew in his chest.

“You don’t have to trust me,” Jack promised, smooth as a viper on an oil slick. The caps jangled. MacCready doubled his estimate, hearing metal click together. Caps came in different _sizes._ “But you can trust a bag full of caps, and the fact that I need a sniper at my back.”

_You have my attention, Jack._


End file.
